M365: 10x Faster Bulk Admin Tool

Key insights

• Bulk Operations gets a full rebuild in the Microsoft Entra admin center, delivering a major speed boost and a modern UI.
  Merill’s Entra.Chat episode with Yanyan Ju and Sweta Kumari covers the new experience and why it matters to admins.
• The tool supports bulk create, update, delete and export for Groups, Devices and Users.
  Admins can now use UPNs when adding users and choose custom columns in CSV export files to save time.
• Engine improvements deliver dramatic 10x faster performance and real-world scale, with exports of over a million groups demonstrated in minutes.
  The system runs operations as background jobs so admins don’t need to split batches manually.
• The new design improves reliability and error handling: one bad row won’t stop the full job, and the portal provides clearer diagnostics for partial failures.
  This reduces retries and admin overhead during large runs.
• The updated workflow in the Entra admin center adds filters, status tracking, and a simpler UI that cuts dependence on PowerShell for common bulk tasks.
  PowerShell and Microsoft Graph remain options for advanced automation.
• The roadmap aims to extend support to more object types and features; recommended best practices include using UPNs, customizing CSV columns, and sending feedback from the portal to shape future updates.
  These steps help admins manage very large tenants more safely and efficiently.

Overview: A look at the video

In a recent YouTube episode hosted by Merill Fernando, the Entra UI experience team discussed a major refresh to the Bulk Operations tool in the Microsoft Entra admin portal. The interview features Yanyan Ju and Sweta Kumari, who explain how the team rebuilt the legacy system to be faster and more reliable. As a result, administrators can now run large-scale tasks with less manual batching and fewer timeouts, a point the guests illustrated with concrete examples. Consequently, the conversation centers on performance gains, usability changes, and real-world tradeoffs for Microsoft 365 admins.

Merill frames the conversation as a practical overview for admins who manage Groups, Devices, and Users at scale. The video highlights both new UI features and engineering work behind the scenes, so viewers get a balanced view of user experience and backend architecture. Importantly, the segment shows how the tool reduces the dependency on scripts and manual workflows while still supporting advanced scenarios. Therefore, the episode offers a useful starting point for administrators planning migration or process updates.

Key features and user-facing improvements

The refreshed tool introduces several immediate gains, including customizable CSV exports and the ability to use UPNs instead of only Object IDs when adding users. These changes simplify everyday tasks, because admins no longer need to cross-reference IDs for common workflows. Furthermore, the UI now integrates filters and status tracking so that bulk jobs run as background tasks that administrators can monitor without continuous intervention. This setup reduces interruptions and allows teams to schedule larger operations with more confidence.

Another major user-facing improvement is error tolerance: the new system avoids failing an entire job due to a single bad entry, and it surfaces clearer diagnostics for partial successes. As a result, admins can recover faster and correct only the failed rows rather than re-running full batches. This approach improves both efficiency and resilience, although it also requires clear guidance to ensure teams interpret partial results correctly. In short, the user experience emphasizes speed without sacrificing clarity about what succeeded and what needs attention.

Performance and engineering overhaul

Yanyan and Sweta describe a deep engineering rebuild that moved the legacy capability into a cloud-native service, which accounts for the reported 10x faster performance. The team optimized background processing, parallelization, and I/O handling to scale operations that once timed out on large tenants. For example, they demonstrated exporting over a million groups within minutes, which shows the benefit of distributed processing and smarter batching. Consequently, administrators can handle enterprise-scale tenants with far less custom scripting and manual splitting of jobs.

However, this overhaul involved tradeoffs in complexity and operational monitoring. The cloud service needs robust observability and careful throttling to avoid overloading downstream systems, and the engineering team must balance peak throughput with consistent latency. In practice, that means the tool may prioritize reliability over absolute peak speed in some situations, and admins should expect predictable behavior even if a tiny fraction of extreme cases require fallback to scripted methods. Thus, the engineering wins come with new responsibilities for service tuning and support workflows.

Tradeoffs and challenges for administrators

Adopting a fast bulk tool improves productivity, yet it also raises choices about safety and control, especially with destructive actions like bulk deletes. Administrators must weigh convenience against the risk of accidental changes, and the team recommends confirmations, previews, and role controls to reduce danger. In addition, relying on the UI reduces the need for PowerShell for routine tasks, but administrators who depend on automation may still prefer scripted approaches for repeatable pipelines or audit-driven processes. Therefore, organizations should plan governance and testing to match their operational needs.

Another challenge lies in error handling and CSV formats: while UPN support makes imports friendlier, bulk operations still require disciplined data preparation to avoid partial failures. Teams need clear processes to validate CSV content, handle encoding and column mapping, and reconcile partial success reports. Moreover, the balance between fast throughput and detailed auditing can be delicate; administrators must decide whether to favor immediate completion or richer logs for compliance and troubleshooting. Consequently, the tool works best when organizations combine it with robust preflight checks and post-operation reviews.

Adoption guidance and next steps

To adopt the new capability, admins should start with non-destructive actions such as exports and bulk updates in a test tenant or with small slices of production data. This approach helps teams validate column mappings, UPN usage, and error reporting before scaling to larger jobs. Additionally, because the service runs background jobs, administrators should plan job windows and monitoring steps to match operational rhythms and business hours. Thus, gradual adoption reduces risk while demonstrating tangible time savings.

Finally, the video underscores that feedback channels remain important: the team plans to extend support for more object types and to refine localization and templates. Therefore, administrators who try the preview feature should provide structured feedback to influence priorities and fixes. In conclusion, the refreshed Bulk Operations tool represents a meaningful productivity improvement for Microsoft 365 admins, though its success depends on careful rollout, governance, and coordination between platform and operations teams.

Keywords

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